UPDATING THE TOURISM SATELLITE ACCOUNT FOR BOTSWANA

In February 2018, Botswana presented its updated Tourism Satellite Account (TSA) for the reference year 2016, a result of a UNWTO project that began in March 2017 and included:

•    improving the tourism statistics database

•    implementing an improved inbound visitor survey

•    providing in-depth training to ensure ongoing data collection and analysis, and

•    updating the TSA (the last one was prepared in 2011 for reference year 2009).

The updated TSA for 2016 showed that tourism directly contributes to 4.9% of Botswana’s GDP, up from the 3.9% recorded in the previous TSA.

This is the third time that the Ministry of Environment, Natural Resources Conservation and Tourism of Botswana has collaborated with UNWTO to prepare a TSA, which is the United Nations Statistical Commission’s standard statistical framework for measuring the contribution of tourism to an economy.

The United Nations has called for a framework of meaningful and feasible indicators for making tourism a real contributor to the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda. The TSA initiative is designed to help strengthen national capacities for meaningful economic measurement of tourism. It is administered by UNWTO as the UN’s official tourism statistics agency.

On this occasion, the TSA was prepared with the support of the Kavango Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (KAZA TFCA), and co-financed by the Federal Republic of Germany through the development bank KfW. KAZA TFCA is a development project of the Southern African Development Community (SADC), owned and led by the governments of Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe